The heads of Israel’s political opposition rallied around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the military on Saturday, after Jerusalem and Washington launched a major joint strike on Iran, with waves of attacks on sites across the Islamic Republic continuing throughout the day.

“We are united behind the pilots, fighters and security forces in the most justified operation there is,” Opposition Leader Yair Lapid declared in a video address, insisting that there were no political implications” of Israel’s war against Iran.

“We are all united on the operation,” he said, only days after boycotting a speech by Netanyahu during an official state visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The strikes on Saturday targeted top Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who an Israeli official later said was dead.

Targets in the campaign, which began shortly after 8 a.m. Israel time, also included Iran’s military, symbols of government and intelligence targets, according to an official briefed on the operation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic information on the attack.

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, a leading rival to Netanyahu in the upcoming elections, expressed his “full support for the IDF, the Israeli government and the prime minister.”

“The entire nation of Israel stands behind you until the destruction of the Iranian threat,” Bennett posted on social platform X following the end of Shabbat. He thanked US President Donald Trump and asserted that the Iranian people now have an “historic opportunity to free themselves from a violent, disconnected, corrupt and failed terrorist regime.”

That sentiment was shared by other opposition figures, such as Blue and White’s Benny Gantz, who declared that “we are all standing together.” Yashar party chief Gadi Eisenkot stated that “today we are all united behind the government managing the campaign, for the security of Israel and the region.”

The Democrats chairman Yair Golan gave his “full backing” to the security services but called into question the government’s handling of the conflict, tweeting that the operation “must culminate in a clear strategic decision: the removal of the Iranian threat in a manner that bolsters Israel’s security over the long term.”

That goal, he insisted, “requires defining precise, coherent and actionable war goals. No more rounds of escalation or managing a rolling event.”

Similarly, The Democrats MK Gilad Kariv insisted that the opposition both supports the troops and “ask questions, keep watch, put up warning signs and not take anything for granted.”

Kariv said that he opposed “any freeze on the Knesset’s parliamentary oversight activities and its committees,” referring to Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana’s decision to halt all parliamentary activities on Sunday.

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is set to hold a special closed session on Monday to receive an operational intelligence review of Operation Roaring Lion, the IDF’s name for the strikes, as well as to hold a vote approving the declaration of a “special situation” on the home front,” the Knesset announced on Saturday evening.

‘Global American imperialism’

Despite widespread backing of the war by Jewish opposition parties, the Arab-majority Hadash party condemned Saturday’s strikes, warning in a statement that they “could lead to the ignition of a large-scale, regional and global war.”

The party alleged that “Israel is not only a tool in the hands of global American imperialism, but also a full partner in it and in its ambitions to tighten American imperialist control over the world, its natural and economic resources and wealth, and to subordinate all regimes to the American will and its economic calculations.”

Calling on members of the public “to raise their voices against Israeli-American aggression,” Hadash slammed “the danger of the almost complete consensus in the government and the main Israeli opposition” regarding the operation and warned “against exploiting public opinion’s preoccupation with this war to increase the massacres and crimes of ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.”

In a separate statement on X, Hadash-Ta’al MK Ofer Cassif, the party’s only Jewish lawmaker, wrote that he opposed “the war of choice,” asserting that it had “no connection whatsoever to the interests, security, or well-being of the Iranian people and the Israeli people or of any other people.”

In response, opposition Yisrael Beytenu party leader Avigdor Liberman declared that Cassif should be tried for “treason against the State of Israel during wartime,” prompting Cassif call Liberman a “racist populist.”

An unprecedented impeachment vote against Cassif, who had made comments supporting a genocide accusation against Israel, failed in the Knesset plenum in January 2024.

MK Waleed Alhawashla of the Islamist Ra’am party called on the government to do more to protect Arab citizens, who face a shortage of available shelters.

“While the Home Front Command is asking citizens to stay in protected spaces, it is important to remember that there are over 150,000 Bedouin citizens in the Negev without protected spaces,” Alhawashla said in a statement.

“We must not continue to wait. We must now place defenses in the unrecognized settlements in the Negev, because if this does not happen immediately, disaster is imminent.”

Agencies contributed to this report.

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2026 US-Israel war with Iran

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